Living and working in paradise: the rise of the 'digital nomad'

Fed up with spending the 9 to 5 in a stuffy office? Anna Hart packs her Mac
and follows the trend for extreme remote working - in Bali

"For everyone who has ever come back from holiday and wished they could have stayed, I am living the dream." (ZISSOU.COM)

By Anna Hart

7:00AM BST 17 May 2015

Typing these words, my forefinger sticks sweatily to the trackpad. When I glance up from the screen, I see steam rising from the neighbouring paddy field. As with all workplaces, there’s a steady hum of white noise: coffee being brewed, group meetings peppered with jargon such as “touch base”, “reach out”, “loop back” and “incentivise”.

But Hubud, AKA “Hub-in-Ubud”, Bali, isn’t a conventional office. It is a bamboo and wood building with an outdoor organic café and a pretty garden dotted with beanbags – and monkeys, as it is just 100m from Ubud’s famous Monkey Forest. For everyone who has ever come back from holiday and wished they could have stayed, I am living the dream – and working in paradise.

This is one of a rapidly increasing number of co-working spaces, where freelancers, sole traders and small companies rent desks and share printers and coffee machines. But even within that hip, fast-evolving realm, Hubud is an outlier – and its 250-strong community believes that this highly covetable office environment is the workplace of the future. The diversity of this group also signals another change: that more and more jobs are becoming portable, possible to do at a digital distance – not just web designers and freelance writers but fashion designers, photographers, models, marketers and even a remote-working GP.

As a freelance journalist, I have long been a convert to co-working spaces. I work from Netil House in Hackney, east London, where I share a studio with a jewellery designer, an arts curator and a photographer. Cycling to work, choosing my working hours and studio mates, I feel like I have got it pretty good, particularly compared to the years I spent working long, inflexible hours in a staff job. Or I felt good until I heard about Hubud. Because if going it alone in a co-working space is the first step towards freedom for the growing number of frustrated, ambitious young professionals, phase two is complete “location independence”; also known as “digital nomadism”.

Anna Hart swapped Hackney for Bali (ZISSOU.COM)

In the UK, thousands of tech workers have already abandoned London for the more affordable, start-up-friendly environments of Bristol, Brighton and Birmingham, and particularly the latter. There, theCustard Factory, Digbeth, formerly the Bird’s factory, is now a hub for tech workers and start-ups, while the Innovation Birmingham complex currently houses about 90 technology companies working on everything from games to business information services.

But when all you need to run your business is a laptop and a Skype headset, why settle for Hackney or Birmingham? Why put up with pollution, urban squalor, rain and high rent when you could open your laptop in Thailand, Australia or Germany – and move on to another hot-desking set-up and Airbnb rental when you get bored of the view?

The "asset-light generation"

In his book The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich, Timothy Ferriss paints an intoxicating picture of a new generation of sun-kissed, barefoot entrepreneurs. Ferriss’s “New Rich” are business owners and freelancers who leverage their location independence to indulge in travel and adventure – which they prize more highly than material possessions.

It is true that travel remains the ultimate aspiration for Millennials like me (those born between 1980 and 2000), and technological and financial circumstances have conspired to give us portable, lightweight lives. (The Soho House Grouphas latched on to the trend and is rumoured to be launching Homework, its new co-working “concept”, this summer, enabling its members to hot-desk their way around the world.)

In 2012 the digital analyst Mary Meeker identified “the asset-light generation”, who access documents, music, film and other media digitally, rather than in some material form, alluding to pillars of the sharing economy such as Airbnb, Zipcar and Spotify – also known as the “pay-as-you-live” market – as evidence that young consumers are increasingly concerned with “access” rather than “ownership”. Which is handy, because ownership – especially of homes – is increasingly a pipe dream. So what are we hanging around for?

I pack my bags...

To find out if digital nomadism is all it is cracked up to be, I waved goodbye to my husband and set off to try it out for a fortnight. Bali, and Ubud specifically, has attracted writers and artists for centuries – Charlie Chaplin, HG Wells and Noël Coward were guests of the German painter Walter Spies in the 1930s – and from the 1980s onwards fashion designers from Australia, America’s West Coast and Britain set up studios on the island.

The Australian designerAlice McCall has worked between Bali and Sydney for years, while Katie and Millie Jackson, the British designers behind Angel Jackson bags and accessories, divide their time between Indonesia and London, with pieces hand-made in their Bali atelier.

But if the first wave of semi-permanent expats were bohemians, the most recent influx are MacBook Air-wielding digitally savvy independent workers. Hubud’s founders, the Canadian video journalist Peter Wall and the Australian Steve Munroe, who worked for the UN, belonged in this category when they met in Ubud five years ago; both have young families, and had been attracted to the area by the prestigious international Green School.

As with all good ideas, Hubud was born of necessity. “We were all doing our own freelance thing from home, and it just wasn’t that much fun,” Wall says. They set up Ubud’s first co-working space with investment from 25 founder members, installed superfast broadband and began hosting seminars and social events to create a sense of community.

“And then these digital nomads started showing up. We never expected to become a mecca for location-independent professionals, but we have.” Two years on, Hubud is moving to larger premises – the bamboo theme stays, as does the raw-food café – with plans to open more spaces elsewhere in Asia.

Trying to find the Balinese work-life balance

I slip into my Balinese routine with ease: yoga at 7am, a hemp smoothie for breakfast, a raw-food lunch, slinking off at 8pm for dinner. The time difference can be a plus or a minus. Many members keep British or Australian office hours so Hubud is open all night.

For me, a 9am GMT deadline meant that I had until 4pm Bali time to meet it, but on the downside, I was still getting work-related emails after midnight. Rather than being distracted by massages and swimming pools and jungle hikes as expected, I found I worked longer hours. Yes, it is perfectly possible to screw up your work-life balance in Bali too.

This wasn’t my first foray into digital nomadism. A few years ago I funded our six-week honeymoon around south-east Asia by working intermittently as we travelled. I didn’t mind the occasional morning holed up in the hotel room or beach hut conducting interviews by Skype because for us, it meant we were able to afford a long, decadent trip, and I’m a mild workaholic anyway.

But six weeks of that lifestyle was enough. The freedom to work in exotic surroundings is thrilling, but it quickly becomes isolating, uninspiring, lonely and – depending on the internet speed – frustrating.

My fellow expats

At Hubud I am surrounded by people who pay membership fees (between $20 and $250 per month, dependent on internet usage) for similar reasons. “Spending all day in a hotel room is not living the dream”; “I found myself getting depressed – even at the beach”; “I need a physical divide between my working day and my downtime.” As Wall puts it, “People come to Hubud for the internet; they stay for the community.”

But stay five months in Ubud and you are aristocracy: the average tenure of a digital nomad in any one place is shockingly brief. Some are on long-term travelling sabbaticalsand plan to move on to a Thai beach in a fortnight, while some come every year to dodge the winter in New Zealand, Canada or Sweden. And it is certainly an eclectic community: rich techies from Silicon Valley, broke hippies launching social enterprises, yogis, Bitcoiners, traders.

Fellow Hubuder Cate Hogan gave up marketing to hot-desk in “Silicon Bali” (COURTESY OF CATE HOGAN)

I would never have guessed that the Paleo-obsessed, yoga-honed, Eat Pray Love-inspired new agers would have near-identical lifestyle requirements as ambitious, money-driven techies, but in Ubud the two worlds have synergised beautifully. When they say, “Tao came over and we did some work”, it might mean they thrashed out the business plan of their start-up, or it could mean the tantric dude came over to clear their chakras.

And the list of portable professions is growing. Dani Gordon is a Canadian GP and early adopter of virtual telemedicine. She runs a clinic three days a week, seeing patients all over British Columbia via a Skype-like secure video platform. “Patients are screened by an assistant beforehand, and I get them to upload high-resolution images of skin rashes, for instance,” she explains.

In Canada, where many communities are remote and there are insufficient doctors, patients have been quick to embrace technology which enables them to see a doctor without driving for 10 hours. “They love it because they get to see me from their own home, and I feel like I provide more thorough care by linking to online resources – like food, sleep and mood diaries and YouTube videos – than in person-to-person encounters.”

Still, Ubud hasn’t been dubbed the “Silicon Bali” for nothing, and tech workers make up the largest demographic. TedxUbud, the local chapter of the videoconference phenomenon, is now in its fifth year. Initiatives like Livit and Tribewanted are essentially bootcamps for start-ups, where office space, accommodation and meals are provided.

A new kind of digital nomad

The original digital nomads were enticed to idyllic destinations such as Bali, Chiang Mai or Hanoi by the lifestyle: exotic surroundings, the low cost of living, great food, warm weather, the dream of getting healthy on yoga and coconut water.

Where Ubud differs is that professionals are now coming specifically for the accelerator programmes and mentoring sessions – a booming industry here. Given that Millennials are predicted to change careers every three years, there is a lot of money to be made by capitalising on career crises; Hubud is partnered with the adult education company TurnPoint which offers residential courses in everything from coding to new-business mentoring.

Everyone I meet is warm and welcoming; as in many expat or island communities, bonds are rapidly forged and carefully nurtured. Mona Motwani, a former civil and human rights lawyer in the US, moved to Bali a year and a half ago after contracting Lyme disease and finding her job wasn’t conducive to her recovery.

Mona Motwani moved to Bali after contracting Lyme disease (COURTESY OF MONA MOTWANI)

With the help of an entrepreneurship course at Hubud, she launched her own ecommerce company selling wellness-oriented travel accessories such as an eye mask that is now a top-rated product on Amazon.

Cate Hogan, who quit her marketing career in Sydney in 2013 to become a writer and book editor in Bali, is now making more money and with far lower living expenses. “In Ubud you find people who would never generally socialise together in the 'real world’, but necessity, and shared values, makes us a tight-knit bunch,” she says.

“You have to be when living overseas. Only recently a friend came down with Dengue fever, another with typhoid, yet another had a motorbike accident. We look after one another, and use our network to cross-promote and support each other in business too.”

So is it worth it?

I’ve always known that travel is good for the soul, but this experience has convinced me that it can also be good for your cv. It is liberating to know that if I ever needed a break from London rent or the weather, or if I felt stuck in a career rut, there’s a bamboo desk waiting for me – provided I could persuade my other half to come with me.

But I’m not tempted to abandon our life in Britain. You could find you have simply traded your old irritations (rain, commuting) for new ones (mosquitos, homesickness). You don’t need to be in Bali to reassess your priorities, overhaul your lifestyle and rethink your career; opportunity can be found much closer to home. Still, Birmingham can’t really compete when it comes to the weather.